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For years, Dave Felker created equipment for one of the world's leading golf companies, Calloway Golf. There he designed golf balls and clubs for the game's best golfers. Then, Dave left Calloway. Throwing the USGA rules out the window and using the laws of physics instead, Dave created the Polara golf ball, which would help correct an average golfer's hook or slice.

What's the most valuable aspect of your business? Is it the bricks and mortar? The equipment? Or is it something intangible? While you can't touch it, feel it or see it, intellectual property when defined as "knowledge" or "know how" is often times the real equity of a business, and if it's lost, it can bring that business to its knees.

"No business plan survives first contact with customers," Steve Blank says. What? Isn't the point of planning that you maximize the likelihood of success in the marketplace? Well yes, but perhaps not the kind of planning you might be thinking about. A business plan conceived on paper, powered by a great idea or invention, enhanced by research on the size of the market and a customer profile, has great potential. But it also has a crucial flaw.

Rahul Sood, General Manager of Microsoft Ventures, is changing how we help startups accelerate. Targeting markets across the globe, Microsoft Ventures is bringing entrepreneurial mentoring, backed by Microsoft's products and support, to give their accelerator companies an unfair advantage in the market.

There's been a growing resurgence of working areas of long tables with copious amounts of white boards. They call them co-working spaces. Since the coining of the phrase in early 2000s, they've grown into warehouse size places with cubical conference rooms and modern furniture, becoming a hip thing for entrepreneurial ecosystems and startups across the globe. But recently, I've come to a realization: Co-working spaces are lame.

Once you've heard the insight--that startups are different from big companies--it seems so obvious. Yet too often entrepreneurs, and those that teach them, approach the building of new companies with the same goals, staff structures and assumptions that motivate the management of large companies. Startup founders build teams to focus on engineering, and on the process of creating a product and bringing it to market.

With 1 Million Cups, as with any startup, our tendency is to put our best foot forward. We spend a lot of time talking about all of the great successes that we've had over the past year--and there have been many. But one of the things that makes our program special is that sense of having a safe space to share what you haven't done well and what you're struggling with on a day-to-day basis.

A well-established business model is important for any startup, but it becomes even more vital for startups developing platform technology. IRISense CEO Brent Cousino said his company had multiple value propositions for his innovation that have provided different expansion paths of success.

At a Life Science Ventures Summit hosted by the Kauffman Foundation, Huffington Post writer Jennifer Hill led a discussion focused on the players in entrepreneurship. The presentation opened with experienced entrepreneurs giving their thoughts on the idea of team building. (00:00-01:19)

A network of U.S. cities facilitating a weekly entrepreneur education program. Go to 1 Million Cups >

Whether you are starting or growing a company, FastTrac will help you live your dream at each stage.Go to FastTrac >

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